


Past Imperfect

by HarpiaHarpyja



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben wants to believe, F/M, FBI Reylo, Fluff, Mild Angst, Past Lives, References to Canon, Repressed Memories, Rey is less convinced, Sharing a Bed, x-files au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:09:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26977882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja
Summary: On assignment in Oregon to investigate a recent spate of spontaneous past-life regressions, Agents Rey Niemand and Ben Solo find more than they bargained for after exploring a mysterious crystal cave.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 37
Kudos: 103
Collections: Central Perk (Reylo) Fuckery, Reyloween 2020





	Past Imperfect

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trish47](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trish47/gifts).



> For 2020 Reyloween prompt event on Twitter -- October 12th is X-Files day! Also a slightly belated birthday gift to Trish47, who's been a great friend and TXF rewatch buddy. :)

It’s a small room—a lone double bed pushed up against the middle of the wall, flanked by a pair of generic nightstands; the tiny desk is equally nondescript, as are the lamps, the mini fridge, the flatscreen television. Rey wonders if anyone actually uses the alarm clock, which appears to be dead now. She peers over at the door; there’s no light from the hallway shining through the crack beneath it. The storm has knocked the power out. She shouldn’t be surprised. At the rate she’s going, she won’t even need the alarm on her phone to wake up, because she won’t actually have slept. Every time she closes her eyes and begins to drift off, the room changes. She’s somewhere else, and some _ one _ else, but still impossibly herself. 

A year ago, she’d have said it was a dream. She’d have made some tea, or turned on the television, or opened her oft-read copy of  _ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe _ until her eyes grew heavy and her mind muzzy enough with familiar, meaningless white noise to fall asleep.

Yet, a year ago, the word “X-file” was a nonsense term better suited to corners of the internet crawling with conspiracy. A year ago, she had not been on her second night at a motel on the outskirts of a tiny Oregon town, investigating a local spate of what many are claiming to be spontaneous past-life regressions. A year ago, she had not been partnered with Agent Ben Solo. 

He actually believes this stuff. Really, truly believes it—or he wants to, no matter how outlandish, occult, or inexplicable. She’s always been the more practical counterpoint. But after what’s just happened, after what she’s just seen, she can’t grasp even a shred of that. She’s awake and confused, groping for her cell and dialing him before she can think twice.

He picks up after the first ring.

“Solo? It’s me,” she blurts, not giving him a chance to speak.

“Niemand, it’s . . .” There is a pause, and she hears him clear his throat, a desk chair creaking. His voice sounds even deeper than usual, thick and low. “It’s almost three in the morning.”

“Can you come to my room? Please? I need—” She almost says she needs him. Not at all what she wants to say. “It’s important.”

“On my way.”

Less than fifteen seconds pass, and there’s a quiet but insistent knock at her door. She bolts from the bed and opens it. Solo is standing there in a tank top and sweatpants, feet bare, hair a badly flattened mess. Aside from an occasional run-in at the gym or on the track, she’s never really seen him out of his work clothes—the slacks, the button downs, the ties, the carefully styled hair, the sometime reading glasses. Now, he’s a little undone, and her lizard brain appreciates it. The rest of her brain is soothed by his arrival, at least enough that she no longer feels lost at sea.

Rey steps back and beckons him inside, then shuts the door. When she turns back to him, she notices the chipped hotel coffee cup he’s holding, dwarfed by his hand. Though it’s half empty, she can smell the cheap instant brew and wrinkles her nose.

“Shit, I forgot you can’t stand the smell of this stuff,” he says abruptly, turning away as if to shield her from it. “I can go leave it in my room.”

“No. It’s fine, Solo, really. Um.” She glances at the desk chair. “Sit down?”

His confusion is evident, but he nods. “Sure.”

Instead, he puts his cup down on the desk and moves over to the tiny set-up of hot beverage essentials atop the mini-fridge. 

“What are you doing?”

“Making you some tea.” He doesn’t look at her as he rifles through the caddy of tea bags and prepackaged coffee grounds. He’s acting so strangely—more strangely than usual, anyway—and for once she’s afraid to ask why. “They’ve got that mint stuff you like. No caffeine.”

Rey laughs darkly. “I’m plenty awake. I don’t think caffeine would make a difference either way.”

“That a yes?”

“Yes. Please.”

She returns to sit on the edge of the bed and tries not to think about how Solo seems like he’s anticipating something, or like he  _ knows  _ something and doesn’t want to bring it up yet. She also tries not to think about the fact that her pajamas are an old UMD T-shirt that’s so thin and ratty it’s not even workout-worthy anymore and a pair of briefs with little blue butterflies on them. If Solo’s noticed and got any thoughts about her calling him over here half naked, he’d hiding it remarkably well; and, frankly, she doesn’t care.

They exchange no more words until the water for the tea begins to burble, and then Solo pours it over the bag of peppermint leaves and hands it to her. He sits at the desk and watches her, waiting as she sips the scalding tea, winces, and sets it aside.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

His face is open and expectant, and she has nothing to keep her from speaking.

“I . . . I’m rethinking your theory from earlier,” she says.

“About the cave?”

“Yeah, that one.”

Last week, a pair of hunters discovered a cavern a few miles outside of town, cut into a previously unmarred mountainside. Convinced they heard voices coming from deep within, they went inside, expecting to find lost hikers. Instead, after following the call for nearly ten minutes, they found a chamber full of crystals growing from the walls, ceilings, and floor. All colors and sizes, jagged, bright, and, the hunters claimed, speaking. When asked what the crystals said, they couldn’t describe it in words. 

They and twelve other locals began to have vivid visions that same night. The next, ten more people. It’s continued ever since, with more people every day. All of them insist they’re experiencing long-buried memories of past lives, even people who’ve never claimed any sort of religious or spiritual beliefs. They can’t explain it, but they know—as sure as they know their names, their families’ names, their addresses, what they had for breakfast—and nothing will convince them otherwise.

She and Solo investigated the cavern for over an hour earlier today. It was jarring, to be sure, but nothing was conclusive. Geologists haven’t even been able to confirm what sort of crystals are growing there. Naturally, Solo suspects the crystals are to blame, whether they’re acting as a conduit between human consciousness and repressed memories of a forgotten existence or focusing some supernatural call from another place and time.

“You said you didn’t hear anything,” he prompts when she remains silent. 

“I didn’t lie, exactly. It’s not hearing, you know?”

He nods, lips pressed together. “It’s a feeling. Whatever those crystals are doing.”

“Yes.”

She remembers the low, almost undetectable thrum in her head as they explored the cave. It branched like a river until it was in her chest too, in her fingers, the ends of her hair, every atom reaching and being reached for. 

_ By what? _

Rey shivers and reaches for the fleece blanket crumpled at the end of the bed but doesn’t wrap it around herself. She just twists it in her hands.

“I felt it too,” Solo confides. A sly little look flits across his face; she can see it even in the low light of the desk lamp. It’s the face he makes when he’s about to tell her about one of his many hunches, especially the ones he knows will pick at the seams of her instinct to assign everything a rational, scientific explanation. “Or . . . maybe you’re right and it’s just toxic fumes that’ve been trapped in the cave for centuries, blowing over the town and causing mass hallucinations.”

Rey glares at him over the lip of her mug and she slurps more too-hot tea.

“So what led to this change of heart?” he asks, serious again. 

There’s a whorl of dark hair falling over his left eye, a cowlick he must usually style into submission, and she’s glad he’s out of arm’s reach or else she’d be smoothing it back. She picks at the hem of her T-shirt and says, “It happened to me. I had a . . . memory. It was mine and wasn’t mine. I understand what the interviewees meant now. I was living it.”

“Another version of you.”

“Of  _ us _ , Solo. You were there too.”  _ Why doesn’t he look surprised?  _ The emotions of the memory yawn wide and open a pit in her stomach. When she draws a tiny breath, the steam drifting up from her cup carries the bright, cool caress of peppermint over her tongue. “I’d hurt you. I was trying to fix it.”

“What do you remember?”

“It was pouring rain. Or maybe in the middle of the ocean. Water flying everywhere. We weren’t on Earth. Don’t ask how I know that—I had the thought and then it was like I had no idea what Earth even was. We were somewhere else, very far away. Fighting on some sort of wreckage with these bizarre swords.” She leaves out how angry she was and the way she hated him but also, somehow, loved him. The anguish she felt was so real, so urgent and incandescent, even to speak of it seems an insult. So she avoids it altogether. “I stabbed you. And I think you would have died, that you almost wanted to, but it— it terrified me. I was horrified by what I’d done. I knew immediately it wasn’t what I’d wanted at all, and the thought of going on without you and knowing I’d done that, it was unforgivable. So I . . . touched you. I took it all back. The wound knitted up, all healed. Your scar . . .”

Her attention drifts and she looks up at him. He’s sitting beside her now, though she didn’t notice him getting up to join her at the edge of the bed. The scar in the memory is the same as the one he’s had for as long as she’s known him: a long, thin line down the right side of his face and neck, ending somewhere past the neckline of his shirt. He claims he doesn’t remember how he got it. Blocked out some past trauma, she assumes. She’s never pried.

But she does, without realizing it, find herself reaching to touch it, just where it curves over the hard ridge of his exposed collarbone. Solo is as surprised by it as she was by his presence beside her, but he doesn’t flinch away.

“What about it?” he says.

“It was the same. But it disappeared. Because of whatever I did.”

A tiny wrinkle forms between his eyebrows. “Are you trying to make it disappear now?”

Rey shakes her head and traces the raised pink line, visible even against his pale skin, with her thumb. She follows it up to his jaw and over his cheekbone to just below his eye. When his long eyelashes brush the pad of her thumb, she moves her touch back down until she reaches the neck of his tank top and hooks her thumbly loosely into the fabric.

“Where did you get it?” she asks.

“Target.”

Piqued, she kneads his knuckles against his chest, shoving lightly, fighting a smile. “Don’t be an ass. You know what I mean. This scar.”

“And you know I can’t tell you, because I don’t know either.” 

Solo’s hand covers hers where it rests now over his heart. His other hand moves slowly to her right arm, tugging the baggy sleeve upward to reveal a scar of her own. It cuts horizontally across her bicep, an angry squiggle of reddened, uneven tissue leftover from where a bullet grazed her shortly after her FBI career and fateful partnership with Solo began.

“This,” he says, coffee breath warm at her cheek, “is from the investigation in Scranton.”

“Of course it was. You were there.”

“Hm.” He passes a finger over it. “Or, it’s from a fight in a room raining fire. You and me against a handful of men who wanted us dead because I’d killed the monster who ruled them.”

Rey blinks rapidly, her eyes suddenly heavy. She remembers this now, though she never saw it. Solo did. That thrum from the cavern is back, quieter but just as insistent, just as determined to pull her into something impossibly faraway.

“I gave you this.” She moves her hand back to the right side of his chest, pulls the neck down a few inches, and looks. The scar ends over his pectoral, slightly hooked, and she knows it was a deep, ugly wound, burnt and bloody. “In that life. This was mine.”

_ All of me was yours. _

Stunned, she pulls her hand away and cradles it to her chest. “What? What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything.” 

“I thought—”

“This has happened to me before,” he interrupts. His baffled expression dims and grows distant. It sounds as if he’s just realizing it himself. “When I was a kid. I got lost in the woods one night during a camping trip with my Scout pack. It started to snow, so I tried to find a place to shelter and make a fire. There was this little cave, but I . . . they found me a few hours later, on my back in the snow, bleeding. Cut open face to chest.”

“How . . .”

“I went somewhere else, Niemand. That’s what I told them. No one believed it, of course. They said it was the hypothermia, the blood loss. That I must have fallen or been attacked by an animal and become delirious. I wasn’t delirious. I was away. Another body, another time, another  _ me _ . I wasn’t in control, but I saw and felt all of it. And you—it was you.”

“I know.” 

Because she does. For an instant her hand burns as if with guilt. She remembers how, when they were introduced a year ago, she thought she’d seen a flash of recognition in Solo’s eyes and felt a bothersome tickle at the back of her mind, urging her to dredge up a memory that simply was not there. Except it is now. 

“I forgot,” he continues. “God, how the hell did I forget? How do you let something like that slip away?”

“Solo . . .” She wishes she had something comforting to say, but it’s never been her wheelhouse. Her love always seems to express itself as the tough sort, and she’s never thought that a bad thing until this moment. She does love him in a way. So she reaches over and pats his knee in a companionable way, and she tries not to think about how much a part of her wants to crawl into his lap and wrap her arms around him. “It’s late. We’re both tired. And it’s . . .”

“Late?” He chuckles.

“Let’s talk about this tomorrow.”

As if it’s a minor point of contention and not . . . what, exactly? What have they discovered here tonight? What does it mean for the future, if the past—a past impossibly far removed from anything they’ve known in this life—is so fractured?

Neither of them explicitly suggests he stay, but he does. They abandon their rapidly cooling drinks on the desk and lie back on the bed, side by side, staring up at the ceiling. Rey tugs the blanket up over her bare legs, which have begun to feel cold, and when Solo reaches for her hand, she slips it into his and links their fingers loosely. It feels good, comforting and right. His thumb passes over her knuckles, back and forth, over and over.

“We should go back to the cavern tomorrow,” she says. “Look deeper.”

“I was going to suggest the same.”

Rey is quiet for a moment. “What do you think is out there?”

“Don’t know. But I’ll settle for the truth.”


End file.
